With that smile that expresses the oriental patience that characterizes them, an official of the Chinese embassy in Buenos Aires risks that Sergio Massa will arrive this Sunday in a dazzling Shanghai.
The truth is that after the prolonged confinements due to Covid and a population that began to revolt, the requirement of 21-day quarantines for foreigners, and an isolation that made the economy creak, the Chinese Government decreed the end of that plague and put all its efforts into recovery.
They say it shows. This happens in the midst of the dispute with the US that seeks to accelerate the decoupling with China. In that tension and in his own desperation for dollars, Massa seeks a two-pronged game, what Perón advised, "I wink to the left and go to the right." In the latter case, it has in favor that 66% of the IMF portfolio is loans to Argentina and despite 22 failed agreements, Washington is interested in Argentina remaining on the waterline, according to diplomatic sources.
By the way, Massa's journey is divided into two stages. The first in Shanghai will be measured in dollars and the second in Beijing where it must be added to the action plan of the silk road that involves investments, some in trains and the most concrete the extension of the Cauchari solar park in Jujuy. It would also include the pipeline that brings Vaca Muerta gas to southern Brazil. Atucha III seems to have been left in the air so as not to raise decibles in the relationship with the US.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan
Diego Guelar, former ambassador to China, believes that the Chinese, who have trade at the heart of their culture and are ready to cross borders and win markets, have given themselves a strategy in the face of the isolation imposed by the U.S. It consists of positioning themselves strongly in Europe and Latin America.
After the so-called century of humiliation, for having been conquered by different empires and after Mao's revolution in 1949 and his several failed plans, President Xi Jinping, 70, who took office in 2013 and who achieved the possibility of being re-elected until 2028, is doomed to a new stage of capitalism. Xi, who was in his youth a rural literacy teacher and son of a victim of the Cultural Revolution, is determined to return to the role of the global locomotive, of course on other rails.
Bilateral trade with Europe reaches US $ 900 billion, the second customer is the US with US $ 600 billion and the third Latin America with US $ 400,000 million. "In Europe, China got into the system, owns 10% of Mercedes Benz, 100% of Volvo, 22% of Citroen and other shareholdings," says Guelar.
In recent years there has been an increase in the Chinese presence in Argentina. It is measured in the Noble-Nidera colossi that explain the bulk of the grain trade and crushing; in mining where Shandong Gold is a partner of Barrick in the Veladero de San Juan project, in the dams they build in the south and even in the controversial observatory of the distant space that twinkles in Neuquén and thatwas key when China visited the dark side of the moon. There are frustrations such as joint investment with local entrepreneurs, including Hugo Sigman's Insud group, for pork production destined for China.
According to the Argentine embassy in Beijing there are about 16 projects in the pipeline after the signing by Alberto Fernández in February 2022 to be part of the Silk Road.
Cauchari, the tallest solar park in the world
In the Chamber of Commerce with China they reveal that the Chinese are like any other investor. That is, they are looking for a safe place in the long term for their capital. It would not be the current case in Argentina. The opinion of the 34 slaughterhouses that have just participated in Sial, the food fair that has just closed in Shanghai, is different: we send them 77% of our meat.
Something that draws attention and that may deepen with the exchange in yuan is the chronic trade deficit of Argentina with China that reached US $ 9,500 million in 2022, while Brazil's surplus reaches US $ 35 billion, that of Chile US $ 10,00 million.
